Comments on: Quickies: TE 2 in Canada, Village Sim, New Video Player

In this quickies update, The TE 2 is launched at the same price as the TE in Canada, Village Sim a new real-time strategy game, a wireless version of Harrison's Manual of Medicine, PalmSource has started a new blog, "easy" iambic products and a new free open source video player for the Palm OS and much more.

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The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

halcyon @ 4/14/2005 5:57:04 PM #

I bought MMPlayer a few months ago to have a couple videos on hand for my kids. So far Core is handling them better and it's free. It seems too good to be true.

I'd be interested to hear what people who are really into audio/video on their Palms think about Core's capabilities and quality.

Hopefully they will add a little more customization and features in future realeases.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

WareW01f @ 4/14/2005 6:43:12 PM #

"Hopefully they will add a little more customization and features in future realeases."

That's the joy of open source. You get to add your *own* features.

Seriously, at my company we've played around with video quite a bit. First with FireViewer and more recently with Kinoma. This is very interesting not only for licencing reasons, but API wise, this should clear up remaining issues the other two tools (as in you can just tweak the base libs as you need too).

Couldn't be better timeing though. The new T|X is a bit more compelling if I can watch time shifted video on it. I see this code finding it's way in to a lot of cool apps in the near future.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

VampireLestat @ 4/14/2005 7:01:31 PM #

Well it is about time Canada gets a break. I paid an outrageous 599$ Canadian for my T5 while American customers were paying way less. The Canadian $ was an is much stronger nowadays and PalmOne decided to pocket that difference and keep the price at 599$ CAD.

Anyways, I doubt PalmOne is giving any gifts to Canadians. Their research probable shows that over 299$ CAD, budget market buyers in Canada must drop like flies.

It is all about charging as much as you can until the sales curb starts to drop.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

Gekko @ 4/14/2005 7:14:17 PM #

Good. The Canadians should all pay more for everything. They live off of the goodwill of the American people.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

mikecane @ 4/14/2005 8:15:07 PM #

>>>They live off of the goodwill of the American people.

As usual -- Gekko, The Ugly American. (As if *he* could have gotten our people out of Iran way back when... thanks again for that, Canada!)

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

WareW01f @ 4/14/2005 10:10:52 PM #

"Their research probable shows that over 299$ CAD, budget market buyers in Canada must drop like flies."

Hmm 299.00 CAD = 240.481 USD according to XE.com so, yep. Looks like the E2 is priced for Canadians.

Early birds get nailed no matter where they are. I actually (after living with a Palm III for quite some time) actually bit on the T|T when it came out. At that time I paid $500 USD (621+ loonies currently) Looking at it from that angle, you got a deal!.

That T|T by the looked pretty snappy running TCPMP and a Matrix trailer off SD by the way. Also scaled quite nice on my Tree 600. Have to wait til tomorrow to try it on a T3 or T5 to see how the landscape looks, but for now I'm quite impresssed. The T|X and a set of ear buds and my guess is you'd by quite happy watching video. Hell, with the WiFi, you could probably stream video on it as well. (Course your probably going to suck the battery dry pretty quick at that rate.) For the travling presentation set add this guy http://www.chait.net/index.php?p=572&page=1 and your set.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

justauser @ 4/14/2005 10:33:35 PM #

Back to the Media Player... Call me cheap but I could never justify paying any $ for a program that should be standard with a PDA these days (PPC have had it since year dot). Let's face it, for 80% of us it's just a toy app that we use to show off our PDA to our friends - who wants to pay for that? For those who need a flashier set up for client presentations, they can pay for the commercial packages.

Well done to the developers of this port. Like previous posters have said, this even runs better than MMPlayer and SmartMovie. Now to streamline conversion of recorded TV programs...

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

AdamaDBrown @ 4/15/2005 3:41:36 AM #

For the record, this is the same Picard who created the famous BetaPlayer for PocketPCs. Given how good BetaPlayer is, I can't wait for my next new PalmOS device so I can check this out.

Even without its lineage, though, I'm not terribly surprised that it outdid MMPlayer. MMPlayer never seemed like a very good app to me. A poor interface, and it just seemed clunky.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

mikecane @ 4/15/2005 9:11:13 AM #

Sheesh. I've caved in. I've downloaded it and will try it out later today.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

mikecane @ 4/15/2005 9:24:30 AM #

OK. I couldn't wait. Installed it and tried it.

MMPlayer needed 1.5MB free to play a video. It was hell freeing up that RAM, but I did it.

Installing this player dropped my free RAM to 607K.

I tried to run the Molly Star Racer MPEG. No go -- because I have screen paralysis on my TE and couldn't select the scrollbar to get to the video in the list. Sheesh. WHY can't devs use the Up/Down button as a substitute?

So I plopped in another SD with the 20MB MPEG of the New captain Scarlet trailer. Yeah, right, let's see if *anything* comes up with 607K of free RAM.

Damn. It did!

But it played like a bad slideshow. Froze on different frames, while the audio still played.

However, that it could do *anything* in 607K of free RAM impressed the hell out of me.

I've just deleted it and played the Scarlet trailer with MMPlayer to refresh my memory. The video runs, but it breaks up into blocks alot, freezes on frames, and the audio is all broken up. And mind you, it is doing this while displaying the video at a *teeny* size. Core used the entire screen side-to-side (the trailer is widescreen).

I'm sold on Core.

Bring on the LifeDrive/Tungsten X!!

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

picard_tcpmp @ 4/15/2005 9:59:26 AM #

"because I have screen paralysis on my TE and couldn't select the scrollbar to get to the video in the list. Sheesh. WHY can't devs use the Up/Down button as a substitute?"

Because I made that open file dialog this night and this is my first Palm OS software :) But I absolutely agree that button navigation is a must. Plus I don't really like the default scrollbar. Probably I will add additional scrolling possibility when the user taps inside the list and moves the pen.

The RAM is split into two parts. Your 600K free space is just the storage heap which is only used by the player for caching the input. Your dynamic heap is probably larger, this is where programs actually run.

bye, Picard

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

mikecane @ 4/15/2005 12:15:01 PM #

Well, from what I saw it is very good work and I look forward to using it on the TX/LD!

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

rasty @ 4/15/2005 1:56:16 PM #

Just tried TCPMP briefly on my T3 and it works like a charm on a few DivX and MPG I have on my SD card!
Plus it's very OS friendly with screen rotation and sound settings, something MMPlayer somehow still fails at!

Great player, it's definitely going to be my default one! Thanks Picard!!

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

jamesgood72 @ 4/15/2005 10:08:37 PM #

Picard,

Wow, very very nice work. Once again, something that Palm should pay you handsomely for (just like they should buy Chatteremail and Pockettunes), but the active developers come to the rescue of the device. I had some WMV's I wanted to carry around. I converted them to DivX, and wam, they played very nicely. A little bit of skipping if you enable dithering on my T650, but very smooth without dithering.

Cheers,

-James.

RE: The Core Pocket Media Player for Palm OS

bcombee @ 4/16/2005 3:58:17 AM #

I was showing off The Core Media Player 0.62 to people at the office when I was visiting palmOne's campus in Milpitas this week, and they all were very impressed. Of course, we couldn't directly endorse this software without resolving all the patent and IP issues, but it's a really nice system, and it was playing a desktop Divx file nicely on my Treo 650, although it broke up with some higher bitrate sections.

CDN price

bbpalmusr @ 4/15/2005 3:51:16 PM #

Only thing is the TE being sold at $299.99 CDN is the TE usually comes with some free stuff (keyboard or mp3 kit), I bet the TE2 will come with no free things....

Tested on TE2: The Core Pocket Media Player

Jempen @ 4/15/2005 5:55:23 PM #

I just tested the media player on the TE2.. and guess what.. it works! Unbelieveable how easy it works, and it is free!

Tungsten T|E, Tungsten T|3

T|E2 price in Europe

Big_Nemo @ 4/15/2005 7:04:58 PM #

I just checked the European PalmOne store (Italy) and the T|E2 sells at EUR 239,00. T|E was priced at EUR 234,99, so it's just five Euros' difference - not the same price like in Canada but close.

Also, the average retail price for T|E' is EUR 200-220 (at least this is what a quick 'net search brought up), I guess in a few weeks you should be able to purchase a T|E2 for EUR 210-230.

Yes, I know that's more than USD 280 at the current exchange rate, but we've been used to that for a while :-(

I just wonder why the +25% price (compared to the T|E) in the US market. Was the T|E underpriced in the US or what?

And yes, I plan to buy a T|E2 - my ol' good M125 has earned a retirement, after serving me so well!